Leap Without Looking
by Running Red Husky
Summary: Sister -groan- piece tp "Internal Wave." Why is Anna jumping off a cliff in the teaser trailer? Kinda angsty. Not meant to be a canonical explanation. Obviously.


Her big sister had ice magic. That was the explanation for thirteen years of aloofness, for thirteen years of silence and shut doors. For the intermittent and inexplicable cold seeps in the vicinity of her sister's suite.

She had been the one to expose her sister's secret. She had publicly lashed out at her sister on her coronation day, a day that was surely already stressful enough. The spears of ice that her sister had summoned formed a defensive barrier to cover the retreat of the terrified Queen.

She had caught up with her sister just in time to see her flee across Arendelle's fjord by freezing over the body of water. The ice was too slippery for anyone not endowed with either magic or spiked soles to follow.

So she had to go the long way around to the place where she last saw her sister's cape disappear into the shadows. The falling snow formed a thick blanket on the ground and covered the shrubs, concealing any traces her sister's passage might have left, ridiculing her feeble efforts to track down the young woman whose cool, detached demeanor was now perfectly understandable.

She traveled in widening circles, calling her sister's name, looking for anyone who might have seen which direction the runaway Queen went. But there was nothing except the snow and the stillness. She came upon a country store. The proprietor was not to be found, but it contained some goods she urgently needed. She left a note for the shop-keeper, instructing him that he should go to the castle for compensation for the items she took.

She continued her search and happened upon a small company of Sami ice harvesters. They were frightened and did not want to stop to talk with her, speaking only of the unnatural blizzard coming from the route to the North Mountain. One of the harvesters caught her eye, a tall young man about the same age as her sister, with a scruffy patch of beard on his chin. The animal pelts he wore almost made his brawny body blend in with the fur of his reindeer, a shabby creature with one broken antler.

"Kristoff," she whispered, though how she knew his name, she could not say. The youth stared suspiciously at her. "And Sven." The troop of mountain men hurried off before she could speak again.

To the North Mountain she went. The snow and ice were beautiful, but she could not shake off a strange uneasiness. A feeling that something was somehow missing from this journey. That she should not be going alone, and not just because of the obvious dangers. A wolf howled in the distance.

She reached the base of the incisor of rock, and gaped at how high up the summit was. There was no sign of a blizzard. Perhaps her sister had calmed down. Perhaps her sister would come out from hiding when she called. Perhaps they could finally _really_ talk. After her sister dispelled the snow, of course.

Up the mountain she trudged, still calling, still feeling an unsettling absence. She passed an incomplete snowman that looked vaguely familiar. It lacked a nose, eyes, arms, and buttons; its weary buck-toothed smile gave it a forlorn air. "Olaf," she murmured.

She could see a chasm ahead - a chasm that separated her from a marvelous tower of ice that grew out of the mountain's sheer upper flank. The palace was tantalizingly exquisite but unapproachable. Just the sort of place her sister would make for herself. She called her sister's name as loudly as she could and waited.

The reply she heard made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. A low growl. She wheeled quickly and saw a wolf following her footsteps in the snow. A very atypical wolf. This wolf's coat was coppery red; its eyes were a deep green; the ruff lining its jaw gave the impression of human sideburns; its expression was friendly and sincere. She was tempted to go up to it. Maybe it would help her.

But she had the sense that the red-headed wolf wasn't supposed to be here, that the red-headed wolf was after prey, even if she herself wasn't on the immediate menu. She ran for cover behind some boulders, and wedged herself into a gap between the stones. She peered around the curve of the rock and saw the red-headed wolf sniffing the ground in pursuit, its expression now devious and hungry. She cursed her lack of foresight, for now she had no way to escape.

The red-headed wolf's snout poked into her crevice, and she did the only thing she could do: She punched it on the nose with all her might. The red-headed wolf was bowled over, yelping in distress while she made a dash for the open. It wasn't long before the red-headed wolf was back on its feet, furiously hurtling after her, snarling and snapping. She found herself outmaneuvered, the red-headed wolf blocking the downslope. There was nowhere to go except toward the chasm.

The abyss stretched wide in front of her; the salivating red-headed wolf raced in behind her. A narrow finger of bare rock jutted out over the void, a poor choice for a last stand or a desperate leap, but the only one that presented itself. She had to jump - and hope that her big sister, who was an expert at ignoring her, had heard her call or could see the peril she was in. And still cared about the little sister who was an expert at pestering her.

She sprinted toward the darkness and launched herself into space, her legs pumping against thin air, and felt gravity take over.

She awoke with a jolt and a shudder, panting from the phantom exertion. It had been just a dream, a product of her mind. Her sister had returned to her rightful place in her life; Kristoff and Sven were a part of her life; Olaf had been granted life.

She glanced around her bedroom, and saw in the mirror that her hair was a mess. A sunbeam slashed across the dial of the clock. Five minutes to ten.

She might as well get up. She had busy day ahead of her as Princess of Arendelle.

**Author's Notes - What do you do when you have two minutes of footage and one word of dialogue (if one word can be called dialogue)? You make up crazy dream sequences! This one-shot doesn't quite line up with Anna's big jump in the teaser trailer, but I think this is a perfectly valid nightmare for her to have in the canon-verse. This one almost wrote itself. Two hours from rough concept to completion.**

**The versions of Kristoff and Sven in this one come from early concept art for the movie. In some of the early drawings of Olaf (probably from when Elsa was the villain and he was a minion), he looked kinda tired and down-trodden.**

**I don't think leaping -ha ha!- to obvious conclusions about what is shown in a teaser trailer this far out from the release date can be done, because "Frozen's" production team made billions of dollars (Starring: Merchandise!) by misdirecting the audience and standing standard formulas on their heads. What are the odds that we'll get a straightforward or derivative sequel? Wait, Disney did kill "Star Wars," didn't they? Well, there's always fan fic...**


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